Determined to be hopeful

August Writing Goals

I have been doing lots of little bits of writing – blog posts, flash fiction, brainstorming – but I haven’t done any longer form writing in a while and I want to get back to it.

There’s nothing wrong with the writing I have been doing but it doesn’t require a lot of focus beyond the time I spend actually writing. Right now, though, I feel drawn to do something that needs planning, outlines, revision, something tangible that feels like I have said something I really wanted to say.

So, in August, I am going to be working on my novel and on a series of blog posts for my coaching blog.

Off to make some notes!

Monday, Monday

I decided to take last Friday and today off so I could have a long weekend and it has been great for my brain (even though the next few paragraphs will make it seem otherwise – bear with me.)

It’s kind of weird though because one part of my brain thinks it is only a day ‘off’ if I am doing absolutely nothing.

Yet, as I have said before, a day with nothing in it is very stressful for me because I spent the whole day subconsciously wondering if I *should* be doing something else.

So, basically my brain is telling me that a real day off is a day doing nothing but if I try to do that, my brain spends the day bugging me about what I’m doing.

Either way, my ends up spending a lot of time asking itself if this ‘counts’ as a day off, if I’m fooling myself, and…you get the drift.

When you couple that with the fact that it is tricky for me to distinguish between my work and my relaxation because my hobbies, my work, and my volunteer work have a lot of elements in common, it makes it even harder to tell if my day off is a day off.

(Especially when you add in the way my brain jumps around and makes connections between things. I could be solving work problems while I am walking the dog or lying in my swing. Not because those problems were on my mind per se but because that’s when the solution floated up.)

So, anyway, that’s where the borrowed phrasing of ‘letting my brain off-leash’ is coming in handy.

I’ve decided that any time in which my brain can be off-leash for the majority of the day counts as a day off.

That gives me nice, broad parameters that are still specific and it doesn’t limit me to specific activities.

And that’s worked out pretty well for me this long weekend.

Exercise Victories

For the past month, I have been doing some extra mobility/rehab exercises every day.

This week, I noticed two things:

1) After my exercises on Tuesday, I felt great!

A little muscle-tired but my brain was awake and my body felt good.

2) Last night, when I reached down for Khalee’s water bowl, the movement was easy.

It’s never super-hard but there has been a sort of stiffness, a resistance, in my movements.

Last night, though, I felt fluid and flexible.

I love this for me!

Another Reminder To Myself

There is no automatic virtue, no automatic advantage to doing things the hard way.

My best bet is always to check out the easy way first and only add more work if necessary to get the job done.

A small white card that reads “start with the easy way and build from that.”
Image description: a small white card on a wooden surface. Handwritten text on the card reads ‘Start with the the easy way and build from that.’ most of the text is in black capital letters but the words ‘Easy Way’ have softer lines and are outlined in black with the centre of each letter coloured in either red, yellow, orange or purple. The word ‘easy’ has some bright gold lines sprinkled around it to highlight it and the background of the whole card had small black dots.

Taking an easy route

Except for meditative doodles, I don’t do a lot of detailed artwork.

Anything that requires a lot of prep work or that needs a bunch of measurements makes the energy cost of getting started way too high for me.

(Meditative doodles are just ‘in the moment’ type of details so they don’t have the same cost.)

But, that being said, I like those round, repetitive designs that a lot of people call mandalas. I’m pretty sure that mandalas are a specific type of design that has a cultural meaning so I won’t use that name for the design I want to make.

I’m not trying to borrow or appropriate a cultural practice , I’m not pretending that what I am doing is sacred, nor am I adding meaning to it – I just want to make a pattern in a circle.

But making a pattern in a circle requires a lot of measuring and every time I have tried that, I have gotten bored with the measuring and haven’t finished the design.

Until now!

Last week, I bought some templates for another project and one of them was a circular pattern of straight lines.

The energy cost of using a template to make my ‘measurements’ is very low.

So now I have an easy route to creating these patterns for myself and I won’t end up abandoning my projects partway through.

Really, taking an easy route gets a bad rap a lot of the time.

Taking the hard route for its own sake, especially if it means you lose the fun and the purpose, is just foolish.